If you’re anyway interested in fine wine Bordeaux will be a heading bandied around many mails coming into your inbox this month. The 2017 en primeur campaign has started and the first Châteaux are gently releasing their prices. This will be an interesting campaign, not least because support for this vintage is (quite rightly) cautious thanks to late frosts decimating vineyards around the region. Members of the trade are looking for a reduction in prices of at least 20% to encourage take up of these wines, still sleeping in their oak barrels. One of the first to the post; Château Palmer

A blog by Fanny Wennerstrom. Our saleswoman in the West. For me, wine is my life but I have had little opportunity to actually do a proper professional wine trip to different regions with other knowledgeable wine lovers. When we were asked to go down to Burgundy, Chablis and Champagne to visit our suppliers, my heart did a flip! We all started off very early to be able to use the days to their maximum I guess and it was a great idea. We landed Wednesday morning in Paris and met up with a driver that was going to drive

Sancerre and Chablis have long been favourites for the whites; perhaps perceived as being indicative of a more assured wine drinker, someone with a little more ‘je ne sais quoi’. But with the 2016 vintage we’re moving into the realms of a shortage of Chablis….

Tastings for Haut-Médoc, Médoc, Moulis and Listrac were held at Ch. Citran in the Haut-Médoc. A rural Château festooned with proud peacocks offered a refreshingly understated venue for the tasting. Looking at the communes case by case: Haut-Médoc showed good concentration for most with less expression on the nose than expected for some. The commune was very hard to define for 2015 overall and has proved to be more of a case of judging wine property by property. Listrac-Médoc generally had good structure in the form of integrated supporting tannins and sweet ripe fruit. Moulis-en-Médoc offered perfumed, expressive tones with the sort of open appeal

Saint Estèphe & Pauillac; with their more northerly position just below the Médoc above Bordeaux, saw the worst of the late rains of 2015. This fact does not however seem to have affected the quality of many of the Châteaux.

We’re in the gates, the flag is raised and the tension is mounting. What will happen when the gates open? Will we all bunch up on the first bend and then fall back when high prices are set or smoothly settle into position, finding our stride, finally emerging from the pack triumphant with new fire to ignite the 2015 en primeur campaign. Bordeaux 2015 is here. ‘The rule of five’* is a phrase that has been bandied around Bordeaux a lot of late. At first mainly due to the desperation of those in the trade hoping for a top vintage following four